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We are doing a project for a IT school, each student have an external drive (WD My Passport enterprise) and we are trying to deploy Windows To Go on these drives.

Each student should be able to flash his drive just by connecting it to a school computer and then power the computer on and do a network boot and use Windows Deployment Service or SCCM to deploy the Windows To Go on the external drive.

We have already a Windows server 2012 running with WDS and another with SCCM for tests.

When we try to deploy on the external drive (disk no 1 selected in our task sequence) we have an error in WinPE it says in brief : Can not format disk 1 because it is not an internal fixed drive.

Is there a workaround ?

Here is the error in LitetouchPE: https://www.dropbox.com/s/p33xqwz6q8axc6p/IMG_20150120_132201.jpg?dl=0

Damien Morattel
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Try using pure WDS with no SCCM. SCCM is basically MDT on steroids and MDT is not what I would use for a bare bones installation of Windows To Go. I currently manually create Windows To Go installations but I am planning on automating it by using pure WDS.

Here are the steps I would follow to create the installation:

  1. Acquire the installation and boot images for your chosen Windows version.

  2. Add them to the WDS server.

  3. Add an answer file that automates the deployment (unattend.xml) You can specify disk partition info in it among other stuff...

  4. Boot to the WDS server and let it do its magic.

There is also the possibility to use your current set up without skipping out on SCCM all together. You can use a custom batch/powershell script to format the HDDs "Manually" by adding in the task sequence a Run Command Line or Run Powershell Script.

  1. In MDT (I don't have access to SCCM) go to the task sequence and open the add menu.

  2. Click on the Run Command Line or Run Powershell script entry.

  3. Configure the option to suit your needs,here is an example on how to automate Diskpart via command line: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16985518/batch-file-for-running-diskpart

  4. enjoy your automated disk whipping (I assume your not having issues with the image deployment).

Notes: Windows To Go is basically an extracted Windows image with the boot on the local device. There are no special files/hardware required for it. Here is the manual way I create the installations (Just in case it gives you an idea on how to fix your issue):

  • Format the device to NTFS
  • Mount the Windows 8.1 U1 ISO
  • imagex /apply D:\sources\install.wim 2 E:\ explanation:D:\ being your mounted ISO 2 being your image index and E:\ being the target device.
  • bootsect /nt60 E: This adds the required boot code to the device so it recognizes bootmgr.
  • bcdboot C:\Windows /s E: This adds BCD/Bootmgr to the target device so that it can boot. I usually use EasyBCD to do this part for me 'cause it has a nice GUI.

That is it! Hope this helps!

Community
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Elliot Huffman
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  • Thanks for your answer, I removed the format task in task sequence and tried to do it manualy with the Lite Touch command line like this: – Damien Morattel Jan 22 '15 at 07:29
  • I created a NTFS primary partition and then mounted the new partition and finally did `bootsect /nt60 e:` But when I tested again the deployment the process seems to work but after it is impossible to boot on disk it says "no operating system found" – Damien Morattel Jan 22 '15 at 07:35
  • `Bootsect` is the first part of making it bootable, Did you do `bcdboot` to add the boot system? `bootsect` only adds the instructions to the filesystem to look for the boot files. `bcdboot` adds the boot files to the File System (In your case `NTFS`). Hope this helps! – Elliot Huffman Jan 22 '15 at 15:23
  • Don't forget to add the os to the boot menu so that the boot system knows what to boot (`bcdedit`) – Elliot Huffman Jan 22 '15 at 16:47
  • I found a way to do it, but I have to do it manually. First I prepare the disk with the Diskpart command line (juste clean and format to NTFS), Then I launch the deployment with litetouch and after I do `bcdboot e:\windows /s e: /f ALL` (E: is the external drive) and then it is booting and windows is working. – Damien Morattel Jan 23 '15 at 07:09
  • But I have to do it manually, so now I'm trying to put the Diskpart and bcdboot in my task sequence, I added a command line task like this `diskpart.exe /s %SCRIPTROOT%/format.txt` (format.txt contains the diskpart commands), But I get an error during execution: https://www.dropbox.com/s/c99z8i0vrjmb8wp/errorFormat.jpg – Damien Morattel Jan 23 '15 at 07:19
  • Solved ! I gave the wrong path for the script ... – Damien Morattel Jan 23 '15 at 12:45
  • I am glad that I could help! – Elliot Huffman Jan 23 '15 at 14:28
  • I have a last question for you, how long does it takes you to do your manual deploy of WTG because for me it takes a very long time (>1h) to do it on an usb drive but when doing the same on the internal drive it takes only 2 min. The task taking so long is "Install Operating System". Is it a usb driver problem or is the HDD not partitioned well ? – Damien Morattel Jan 30 '15 at 07:36
  • Well, what I have encountered when I deploy windows to go via imagex is that all computers are not made equal even if they are the same model. I would try to deploy using different computers and or higher usb versions. It takes ~ 15-30 min to deploy and make bootable using USB2.0 on my main desktop. Before deploying I always use diskpart to clean the disk then I use explorer to format NTFS using the default allocation unit size. after that is finished I do the above with imagex... – Elliot Huffman Jan 30 '15 at 13:37